The headlines are back: “Settler Violence”

Avi Abelow

The headlines are back. “Settler violence.” “Extremists besiege Palestinian family.” And this time even US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, a genuine friend of Israel and of Jewish rights in Judea and Samaria, joined the chorus, calling the young Jews involved “Israeli terrorists” and describing their actions as a “horrific act of terror.” He has since walked it back. But the damage was done.

All of this over events on a mountaintop in Samaria, on the slopes of Jabal Ein Aneva, high ground between Migdalim and the Shilo bloc, not deep inside the Arab village of Kusra as being reported. High ground the Palestinian Authority has been working for years to seize.

Before we accept the framing of the media, please take a moment with me to stop and look at what is actually happening.

Kusra is not a quiet farming village. It has a documented history of terror against Jews: lynchings of hikers, including boys on a bar mitzvah trip; bomb attacks; regular riots. For years the PA and local village councils marked Jabal Ein Aneva — the second-highest mountain in Samaria — as a strategic target. Whoever controls that ridge controls the surrounding region. They paved roads, prepared sites, and rapidly built homes with PA funding to push Arab settlement onto the mountain. One of the people who stepped forward for that project was Kosai Abu Rida from Kusra.

About eight months ago, just before the ridge could be fully taken, Jewish families and young men went up and established a presence at the top. They named it Tel Talfiot. That is what Jews do when land that is ours is being seized: we go up.

Kusra answered with a campaign of terror. A flock of sheep was poisoned. Explosive charges were planted and only neutralized at the last second. Residents faced attacks and lynch attempts. Shepherds were assaulted.

Kosai Abu Rida himself was documented participating in a brutal lynching of a shepherd, pinning him down and attempting to strike him in the head with a hoe. He was arrested and absurdly released. Masked rioters were filmed throwing stones from the area of his house. Just three weeks ago, shooting attacks were carried out from the vicinity of his house toward the Jewish hill.

Two weeks ago, during a heatwave, a few Jewish shepherds set up a temporary pen on the slopes, two terraces below Kosai’s house. That house sits as a forward outpost on the path to the spring the sheep use for water. According to those on the ground, there was no violence directed at the residents of the house. No one prevented the family from coming or going. No one raised a hand against security forces. On the contrary, the young men on the hill have maintained cooperation with the IDF soldiers in the sector. They were even documented praying Mincha together, an act that our soldiers are being shamed for taking part in.

Why did these proud Jewish resettlers in Samaria do this? Because of an IDF policy of decades that refuses to treat an enemy population that terrorizes us daily as an enemy, while ordering soldiers to preserve as much “normal civilian life” as possible for that same enemy jihadi population.

So Jewish resettlers step in to protect Jewish lives when the army will not.

That illegally built home on the mountaintop that just got headline news around the world should have been demolished months ago by the IDF. That is the real problem.

The moment the IDF treats the enemy population in Judea and Samaria as an enemy, there will be no need for any “settler” to ever get involved like this again.

Kosai, connected to the effort to push Jews off the mountain and to left-wing organizations, launched a media offensive. Dramatic reports spread. The IDF spokesperson came under pressure and issued condemnations. Senior commanders rushed to the scene. Forces were sent to dismantle and confiscate. A few dozen young men tried to block a road to prevent the confiscation of vehicles, the kind of protest Israelis have seen hundreds of times in other contexts. According to those present, they did not attack the forces.

From there the machine took over. The “settler violence” narrative, carefully cultivated as a central theme for the coming election season, swallowed the story whole. Even some on our own side repeated the talking points without examining the sequence of events, the terror history of the village, or the strategic PA land grab.

Let us be clear about the actual elements:

– A village with a record of terror against Jews.

– An Arab activist with documented involvement in violent attacks who should not be free.

– A house built away from the village as part of a nationalist push to control strategic high ground and terrorize Jews.

– Jewish shepherds and young families asserting a presence on land that is the heart of the Jewish homeland.

– No verified violence by those shepherds against the Arab family or against IDF forces in the version of events coming from the ground.

These young men and families are not the problem. They are doing what Jews must do if we intend to remain in our land, when the IDF policies fail us: they go to the places the enemy is trying to take, and they stay. They live under threat from a population that has murdered Jews before and continues to try. They accept the danger while much of the country debates them from a comfortable distance.

The Palestinian Authority, with European funding and international diplomatic cover, works methodically to create facts on the ground that erase Jewish presence. The hilltop youth disrupt that project with their bodies. Calling them the aggressors while ignoring the terror infrastructure and the strategic land grab is not moral clarity. It is moral inversion.

I am not defending every action by every individual. Criminal violence should be investigated and punished, by Jews against Arabs or Arabs against Jews. But the automatic rush to condemn the Jews on the hill, the adoption of the media framing without scrutiny, and the failure to defend those who are actually holding the line is a failure of leadership and of basic solidarity.

These young people are willing to put themselves in danger on the front line of the struggle for the land. That is not extremism. That is the continuation of the Zionist act of settlement under fire. The real extremism is the ideology that still seeks to make the Land of Israel free of Jews, one ridge at a time.

We should be thanking the people who refuse to surrender the high ground. Instead, too many are busy echoing the campaign against them.

It is time to stop. Check the facts. Stand with the Jews who are standing on the land. The alternative is to keep handing victories to those who openly work to take it from us.

Ambassador Mike Huckabee is a genuine friend of Israel. That is precisely why the language he initially used is so damaging. When a friend reaches for the word “terrorist,” especially when it is totally disconnected from the truth, it becomes harder to reclaim the truth.

Huckabee knows foreign governments have been investing heavily in the USA with efforts to turn Christians and Conservatives against Israel. The information pipeline that reaches even well-intentioned supporters is contaminated. We have already seen it with the Taybeh church story, an initial claim of Jews burning an ancient church that collapsed when the truth got out that it was Jews putting out a fire ignited from Arabs, that got close to a destroyed ancient Church building, yet still produced strong condemnations, even from Huckabee, before the facts caught up. The same machinery is at work again.

This is not abstract. Congresswoman Kat Cammack has confirmed reporting that Qatar is the hostile country placing foreign agents inside the offices of members of Congress, disguised as “interns.” This follows a report that the FBI is investigating a top GOP congressional staffer who has allegedly worked as an undisclosed Qatari agent inside Congress for at least three years.

Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna has announced that declassified files will be released in the coming weeks about a former member of Congress who placed “interns” in other offices who were agents of foreign governments. After the reporting, Cammack confirmed the foreign government in question is Qatar.

Cammack has introduced legislation requiring background checks and disclosure of foreign ties for congressional staff precisely because this is a live national-security problem. Qatar, a major funder of the Muslim Brotherhood and a longtime host of Hamas leadership, has every interest in shaping American opinion, including turning Christians and Conservatives who have historically been Israel’s strongest base of support in the United States, against Israel and the Jews.

When influence operations of this kind succeed, even friends of Israel can be steered into language that serves the other side’s narrative. The “settler violence” campaign is one of the preferred tools.

Complex events on the ground in Judea and Samaria are stripped of context, history, and the daily reality of jihadi violence against Jews, then packaged for maximum moral outrage. The result is that Jews defending the high ground of our homeland are labeled the aggressors, while the strategic land-grab and terror infrastructure that provoked the confrontation disappear from the story. And the jihadi enemy population who self-identify as “Palestinians” is not even labeled as an enemy.

Huckabee’s goodwill toward Israel is not in doubt. The quality of the information reaching him, and reaching many others, is.

Until that pipeline is cleaned, good friends will keep being recruited, sometimes unknowingly, into a campaign whose goal is the opposite of what they intend.

The young Jews on those hills are not terrorists, they are Jewish heroes on the frontline against jihad trying to protect the Israeli population and the whole freedom-loving world.

They are the thin line holding land that the Palestinian Authority, with European funding and international diplomatic cover, is trying to seize. The real foreign interference is the effort to make Americans, especially Christians and Conservatives, stop seeing that clearly.

We need our friends to demand the full context before they believe the daily lies against us. Anything less hands another victory to those who have been running this campaign for years. And the battle delegitimizing “settlers” is ultimately about delegitimizing all Israelis.

We overcame 2,000 years of exile and blood libels. We will overcome these blood libels too.

At least now we are back as a sovereign people in our God-given, indigenous, ancestral homeland.

Strengthen your faith in God. Stick with me for the truth.

We got this.

All Yisrael Chai!!!